Leadership and Change Agility

Conduct of change is a hot topic in many businesses as we currently evolve in a VUCA environment to which we must continuously adapt. The latest geopolitical tension Ukraine and economic decoupling fears emphasize necessary business agility.

Early in our career, many of us have technical backgrounds, we tackle disruptions with a problem-solving mentality. This might work on the operational level of implementation, however organizational change deals with a different logic related to adaptation with respect to an environment and a vision. ?Leadership training provides a clear conceptual foundation for the notion of organizational change, which covers a mixture of considerations such as structural mismatches, employee’s habituation processes, and adequate change trajectory adaptations.

Current leadership skills, encompasses a vision that builds change agility into the cultural behavior of an organization.?This is built upon a leader’s situational awareness, for power mapping, and emotional intelligence in addressing stakeholders while onboarding them on that journey. Being trained on the 8 steps described by j. Kotter and illustrated in his book “our iceberg is melting” provided a solid framework to tackle that change, however many mistakes need to be avoided to drive the momentum and success. I will share some I made in my career.

One of the main mistakes was not driving enough urgency before throwing myself into action. Many resistances have risen and slowed down the process, it has raised employee annoyance stifling the project and missing possible opportunities. Change is also an extensive process that cascades, through effective communication, from change project committee members developing a vision to the entire organization and helping in the onboarding process.?Members and Operational leaders should be carefully selected, to cover the full power spectrum, to avoid uninterested behaviors and misunderstandings.

Another mistake I made was mismatching the needed resources. My own capabilities and motivation were easily depleted, no matter how strong they were, they were weak compared to the required activation energy, provided by a solid team, to overcome massive sources of inertia in a company’s habits, culture or history.

Managerial behaviors are supposed to be exemplary, otherwise this can be very toxic to change if contradiction is seen with the official communication. People will lose clarity on the job to be done. While Survival and urgency are drivers for onboarding, on the long run this is an unsustainable process which can lead to high employee attrition rates and project failure. Such instances should be addressed firmly and quickly early on in the process, so these behaviors do not hamper change.

I hope sharing these experiences will help you mitigate risks in tackling change projects. Those projects helped me evolve from a managerial mindset of planification organization and control, into a leadership position of orientation, alignment, and inspiration.

Indeed, Lamarck’s vision, species adapting, compared to the Darwinist views, natural selection, is very relevant in the context of change in organizations.? I will like to leave you with Lamarck’s quote, so it stretches your awareness to be better change leaders :

“We know that this animal [the giraffe], the tallest of mammals, dwells in the interior of Africa, in places where the soil, almost always arid and without herbage, obliges it to browse on trees and to strain itself continuously to reach them. This habit sustained for long, has had the result in all members of its race that the forelegs have grown longer than the hind legs and that its neck has become so stretched, that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, lifts its head to a height of six meters”